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she’s an actress. Yes, three sons, Jehosophat, Ezekiel and Susan—we’re a bit worried about Susan”).
    In the Herat, one of Kabul’s few tolerable restaurants, we meet Kalahan, a twenty-four-year-old student (married, four children). He asks me earnestly about “prostitution houses.”
    Brothels, I correct him.
    “Please—what is that word?”
    He writes it down as I spell it out.
    “Please—are they legal where you live?”
    I’ve no idea. Sort of, I think.
    “But please,” he asks, “if everyone is allowed to sleep with each other anyway, what is the point of them?”
    I try asking Kalahan about the civil war that ravaged Kabul and killed thousands of its citizens in the early 90s. There’s enough of Kabul still standing up to give me the idea that it must have been quite an attractive city, once. It was also rather fun, according to long-serving expats I meet in the UN Club, now Kabul’s only licensed premises
(“In 1992,” recalls one Belgian doctor, “you could stay out all night, and it was only about as far off the pace as Budapest, or somewhere like that”). Today, several suburbs of Kabul are uninhabitable ruins, though people still inhabit them. Even the less damaged areas look like English football fans have been staying in them (“And culturally,” the same doctor tells me, “this place has gone from 1976 to 1376”).
    Kalahan and others his age don’t really want to talk about the war, or the Soviet invasion that preceded it, or the Taliban takeover that followed it. This is understandable—it’s all they’ve ever known. UNICEF estimates that 70 percent of Kabul’s children lost a family member between 1992 and 1996. It’s like trying to get Mauritanians excited about discussing drought.
    “The Taliban,” explains Kalahan, resignedly, “stopped the war.”
    But aren’t you frightened of them?
    “Of course. But they won’t last. Nobody does.”
    Nobody, least of all the Afghans themselves, has ever succeeded in governing Afghanistan’s volatile mix of tribes (half Pakhtun, with the balance made up by Tajiks, Turkomans, Uzbeks and Hazaras). Many have tried: the Sikh and Persian empires, Tsarist Russia and Victorian Britain. In 1979, the USSR decided it was the nation for the job and, just as America had done in Vietnam, found its immense, sophisticated army locked in unwinnable combat with motivated guerillas—performing the military equivalent of trying to swat wasps with a steamroller.
    When Mikhail Gorbachev admitted the jig was up in 1988, Red Army casualties stood at 50,000. The road between Kabul and the Pakistani border is still littered with rusting remains of dead Soviet tanks. The tribesmen of Afghanistan, the dashing horse-mounted mujahedin who had opposed the initial Soviet invasion with rusty cutlasses and flintlock rifles, were by this stage bringing down MIG fighter planes with Stinger surface-to-air missiles. They hadn’t found these lying around—America, reasoning that the enemy of its enemy was its friend, spent $3 billion equipping and training the mujahedin. In creating this army of Islamic holy warriors to fight the godless communists, decadent Christian America forged the heavily armed and anarchic environment in which the Taliban would flourish. Funny old world.

    The common enemy defeated, the mujahedin took their shiny new American weapons, and their captured old Russian ones, and fought amongst themselves. Throughout the early 90s, former mujahedin chiefs and sundry warlords—notably Ahmed Shah Massoud, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Rashid Dostum—fell in and out with each other at such a rate that the favoured black humour fashion item among foreign aid workers at the time bore the legend “My party raided Kabul and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.”
    Enter, in late 1994, the Taliban. The Taliban—the term is a plural of Talib, or religious student—formed in the madrasas (Islamic schools) of the southern city of Kandahar. They had Allah on their